PASADENA >> Is it a case of a postal employee dumping mail? Or the work of a conscientious citizen trying to save landfill space?

Louise Bell wants to know.

Bell, a Pasadena resident and avid recycler, found hundreds of pieces of unopened mail in two large trash bins at the public recycling center at Caltech in Pasadena on the afternoon of Nov. 30. Mail was found in a bin marked “newspaper” and in the one labeled “mixed paper.”

She was concerned someone, perhaps a postal worker, got tired of delivering the bulk mail and tossed it into the recycling bins.

So, Bell, the daughter of a postal worker herself, filed a complaint with the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General (OIG), who is investigating the matter, along with the Pasadena branch of the U.S. Post Office, which assigned it a case number and alerted the supervisor for the area, Derry Feng, to pursue the claim.

At first, Bell said she didn’t believe the post office would take the matter seriously, so she brought some of the mail to this news organization’s office. She found it odd that someone would throw out sealed envelopes addressed to recipients marked with pre-sorted First Class postage and/or bulk rates. She had never seen anything like that before and she’s a weekly regular at the public recycling center. Last week, Feng retrieved the mail after Allan Alexander, a consumer affairs agent with the local post office, indicated Feng should collect the mail as possible evidence.

There were pamphlets from electoral candidates, notices from Pasadena City Councilman Victor Gordo of an upcoming community meeting, brochures listing extension classes at Pasadena City College, letters from banks with credit card offers, insurance companies asking about health coverage and retirement benefits, Christmas cards and at least 18 thick, oversized envelopes from Linden Optometry containing a 2017 desk calendar.

“This is important to me,” Bell said. “I think people’s mail should be delivered. I have heard where postal employees hoard mail and then they dump it.”

Most of the mail brought to the newspaper office by Bell was mailed to the same address, an apartment building on Villa Street located a few miles away from Caltech. However, the building was marked “for Caltech students only” and a person answering the front door buzzer indicating “manager” said he had no complaints of stolen mail.

“Any items found in recycling would typically only be placed there by community members, not Caltech employees,” wrote Steve Ritea, Caltech’s senior director of communications in an email.

The OIG investigates possible employee malfeasance, while the U.S. Postal Inspection Service looks into mail theft in general, said Stacia Crane, spokesperson for the Inspection Service.

Steve Linden, business manager of the optometry store on Colorado Boulevard, has also been working with the post office since learning that many of the company’s calendars were trashed. The company sends out 50,000 calendars a year as a promotion. The blue-and-gold desk calendars are favorites at dry cleaners and auto shops around town. They have become something of a Pasadena tradition, said Ann Erdman, former city spokesperson and current blogger.

“That calendar usually arrives around about the first week in December. It is just because of the timing, at least for us local yokels, that it really sets the stage for the beginning of the holiday season,” she said. On her Facebook page, Erdman posted a picture of the calendar. She received 63 likes.

“It has become, I believe for them, a very important marketing and branding tool,” she said, adding that they pay good money to have it mailed.

Linden said some people who move from Pasadena call the store to ask if their calendars can be sent to their new home in Texas or elsewhere. He said the store obliges them.

He said the calendars get mailed in the first three weeks of December. “We try to cover the entire city,” he said.

Feng would not speculate on how the mail got to the public recycling center on campus, saying only that this time of year mail thefts increase.

In late August, federal authorities charged 33 defendants, most of them postal employees from Southern California, with stealing or hoarding mail. Postal authorities say keeping mail could lead to an employee committing identity theft. In this case, it’s possible someone picked out mail with identifying bank numbers of Social Security numbers and tossed the rest into the public recycling bin, authorities speculated.

“Mail theft across Southern California has increased recently, which is significant since this type of crime tends to be a precursor to other crimes like identity theft and drug offenses,” said U.S. Attorney Eileen M. Decker when the indictments were made public.

To report mail theft or fraud, contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service at 1-877-876-2455, or visit their website at: https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov.

Steve Scauzillo covers environment and transportation for the Southern California News Group. He has won two journalist of the year awards from the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club and is a recipient of the Aldo Leopold Award for Distinguished Editorial Writing on environmental issues. Steve studied biology/chemistry when attending East Meadow High School and Nassau College in New York (he actually loved botany!) and then majored in social ecology at UCI until switching to journalism. He also earned a master's degree in media from Cal State Fullerton. He has been an adjunct professor since 2005. Steve likes to take the train, subway and bicycle – sometimes all three – to assignments and the newsroom. He is married to Karen E. Klein, a former journalist with Los Angeles Daily News, L.A. Times, Bloomberg and the San Fernando Valley Business Journal and now vice president of content management for a bank. They have two grown sons, Andy and Matthew. They live in Pasadena. Steve recently watched all of “Star Trek” the remastered original season one on Amazon, so he has an inner nerd.

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